The Growth Bottleneck Most Executives Don’t Notice

At any stage, growth bottlenecks are a serious concern for businesses. Whether trying to emerge from the bootstrapping startup phase or attempting to scale a larger enterprise, an executive’s ability to identify and resolve bottlenecks is critical to sustained growth.

While most executives naturally focus on bottlenecks in areas such as marketing, logistics, and project management, Han Butler, president and co-founder of contact center solutions provider ROI CX Solutions, argues that many are overlooking another critical area: customer support. As he explains, failing to make customer support a priority in a business’s early stages can cause lasting harm to its growth strategy.

The Importance of Customer Trust

“Quality customer support is a foundational element to gaining — and keeping — consumer trust,” Butler explains. “Most of the time, when someone is making the effort to reach out to you, it’s because they have a problem or question that they can’t resolve on their own. Your customer support team’s ability to provide an effective solution can be the difference between making them a loyal customer for life, or driving them to a competitor.”

As reported by Customer Experience Dive, almost nine in 10 bank customers feel that the customer experience is equally or more important than the products or services their bank offers. Additionally, 53% of bad customer experiences will cause a customer to cut their spending.

For many customers, being able to get dependable help from a real person is the biggest driver of trust. One recent survey found this type of human support as the second-leading trust driver for businesses, only trailing consistent products and services.

Without quality customer support to build a foundation of trust, businesses will struggle to retain existing customers. Even worse, negative word of mouth stemming from poor customer support can make it harder to attract new customers.

The Hidden Costs of Unresolved Feedback

The potential of losing existing customers because of poor customer support should be enough for most executives to prioritize that part of the business. But as Butler explains, some of the biggest threats to long-term growth are even harder to spot. “When done right, customer support can be one of your most valuable resources for collecting data,” he notes.

“Support tickets can reveal common pain points with your product or service, telling you what needs to be improved to deliver better outcomes for your customers. But if you don’t have the right systems in place to capture that information, you’re going to lose critical insights into how you can make your offering more appealing.”

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Just how impactful can such feedback be? In 2009, Domino’s Pizza revamped its pizza recipe after collecting significant criticism of its previous pizza recipe. Launched with an advertising campaign that highlighted how the company was listening to customer complaints, the move helped Domino’s double its profits in the quarter after the new recipe was introduced.

In this case, carefully listening to customer feedback led to a complete overhaul of the company’s core product, resulting in significant growth. But without these customer-focused initiatives, Domino’s might never have made the change. When businesses fail to account for customer support, they can similarly miss out on critical pain points that could help them scale profits far more dramatically than if they continued to do things the same way as before.

Scaling Customer Support the Right Way

“When it comes to scaling customer support, it’s essential that you look at the operational metrics that are tied to effective customer support,” Butler says. “How long is your first response time? How often does a customer have their issue resolved during the first contact? Alternatively, do you have a high rate of calls where an agent needs to escalate to a manager? Some of these issues could indicate you don’t have enough headcount to provide effective customer support, but others may be a sign you have underlying training or infrastructure problems.”

Because of this, Butler advises that executives take a closer look at their customer support metrics so they can take a more holistic approach to the issue. Outsourcing customer support to an experienced third-party can be beneficial, especially during scaling initiatives that require more flexibility. But such headcount initiatives need to be paired with the right framework that will enable support reps — whether internal or external — to succeed.

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“Much of the time, customer support issues exist because the business doesn’t have clear structures or knowledge bases in place to support their agents,” he explains. “Developing a comprehensive knowledge base paired with an AI assistant can help representatives quickly find accurate answers. Smarter call routing can get the right calls to the right agents. Clear decision boundaries also ensure that service reps can solve problems in an appropriate, compliant manner or know when to escalate. If you have fragmented systems or poor standard operating procedures, throwing more reps at the problem won’t solve anything.”

By pairing foundational systems with increased headcount, business leaders can effectively tackle both issues.

Transforming Customer Support Into a Strength

As Butler’s insights reveal, failing to prioritize customer support can have lasting repercussions on a business’s growth efforts — even if other potential bottlenecks have been addressed.

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On the other hand, by making support a priority and implementing business-specific strategies to improve it, businesses can strengthen their reputation with customers and lay a foundation for sustainable growth.